Me

Things I do

April 2007 Entries

One very exciting news: Microsoft is going to host up to 4GB of videos per person, free of charge. The tool Expression Media will allow very easy encoding of these videos in a format and quality compatible with Sliverlight. Once encoded, upload your video to the Microsoft site, and you get a URL which you can then embed in your website.

The nice things is that the videos are streamed, and this is supported natively by the SIlverlight engine.

We saw so many amzing demos this morning. My preferate... well, I loved to see .NET play chess against JavaScript. To do this, ScottG programmed a Silverlight application, and used the exact same Chess algorithm in C# and in JavaScript. This application allowed to play against the machine, and to select with engine each player was playing with, so it was possible to let the JavaScript engine play against the .NET engine. The application was displaying the number of nodes processed while running for ......

That's a big news. Scott Guthrie actually demoed programming Ruby, on a Mac (so without Visual Studio), against Silverlight, with .NET!!! .NET is becoming more and more open to other technologies and platforms, and I love it. Great move.

The big news We were expecting a big news today, there are actually two: Silverlight will be able to run .NET. This was actually announced to us under NDA a few weeks ago. Here's a great opportunity to create service-enabled application on the web without JavaScript. Quote from Ray Ozzie: "Silverlight brings .NET to the Universal Web". Silverlight will have three pillars: Video, .NET and Services. Microsoft Expression shipped today! We heard rumors that this might be true, now it's confirmed! Congrats ......

Getting started Breakfast was had (great buffet like last year, and the dining room is pretty impressive and huge!) Trying to recognize known faces, but no luck yet! I also registered and got my goodie bag. The notebook looks great, even nicer than last year (I am still using last year's one, actually, and the pen). Apparently the myspace.com gadget is a CD opener. Man, that's bad engineering! These CD cellophanes are actually so damn hard to open that someone has to come with a gadget! Wouldn't ......

That was a LONG trip, but here I finally am. Check in went fine, the room is nice though less impressive than last year (well, last year I had, for some reason, received a huge suite). This year, I "just" got the "regular" suite in the Venezia tower. Seriously, the room is great. After check in and a long hot shower, since it was too late to register for the conference, I just went downstairs for a bite, and for a small walk in the casino. The energy here is amazing. I will register tomorrow morning, ......

Et voilà, I am off to Vegas. First my flight with Swiss airlines goes to Chicago, and then I'll take a UA flight to Las Vegas, where I'll arrive around 8:30PM local time. It's a really long trip (It's now 11:50AM in Switzerland, and I'll be in my room in the Venetian probably around 6AM tomorrow morning, swiss time) but I am convinced it will be totally worth it. Next year was amazing, and it has brought me so many new things to think about, to try out, and so many new contacts in the programming ......

So...I spent more than one hour yesterday night to create a schedule for all the session that interest me this year at MIX. Yeah. I need to clone myself. Three times. If 4 of me go to MIX, I might get a chance to see all the sessions I want to see. At this point, I don't prioritize any further. Based on last year's experience, I'll decide spontanously what I want to see during each slot. Obviously, I'll make sure to attend the Identity Mine sessions, but there arfe so many others! Sessions at MIX07 ......

Seriously, what's up with the MIX07 website?? My default browser is Firefox for various reasons. That's how the website looks in it: MIX07 website in Firefox Unreadable. Which is funny and ironic when you remember the playdoyers for compatibility we heard at the very same event last year. OK, I'll open IE to look at the site then. Ooops. MIX07 website in IE ......

WPF book: Windows Presentation Foundation unleashed This book has been praised a lot by WPF experts I talked to, so I decided to purchase it, and I just got my copy. So far I had been working mostly with the well known WPF book by Charles Petzold, and thought it would be good to have another reference. The first impression is excellent. The book is very colourful and seems quite easy to read. The approach seems quite different from Mr Petzold's book. Instead of concentrating on C# code first and ......

One of the most exciting feature I learned about in the WPF course two weeks ago was that you can bind an ObservableCollection's content to just any type of Panel, by using an ItemsControl and the ItemsPanelTemplate property. In order to check if I had understood the technique properly, I made a small working example. It actually worked out pretty well, so well in fact that I decided to publish it, hoping that it can help someone out there. I am walking you through that example here. I published ......

I published the pictures from our trip to the Seattle area 2 weeks ago on my PhotoAlbum. In order to train us with WPF, 8 developers and 3 designers involved in the project had the chance to follow a training given by IdentityMine, an excellent firm specialized in WPF development in Tacoma, WA, not far from Seattle. The training week was amazing, and we also took the opportunity to drive to Redmond, where Microsoft has its headquarters and campus, to meet a few architects with whom we were already ......

I spent quite a lot of time with Expression Blend lately. I like that program more and more. It needs some getting use to it at first, but it's just great to be able to open the same project file and source files in Blend and in Visual Studio simultanously. You can design your UI in Blend, including bindings, etc..., you can even run it to check how it looks like "in real", and then you can switch to Studio to do the code behind, add data sources, etc. One thing I miss in Blend is Timeline-based ......

Debugging the XamlParseException (continued) In a previous post, I mentioned how you can get more details about the XamlParseException thrown when something is wrong with the XAML (but you don't know what exactly). Well, a reader named Daniel Puzey made a comment to that, and I think it's worth posting that again: There's another trick to this. Often, by default, you'll get an error reported at Line 1 of the xaml, which is an obvious lie. You can catch the original exception, though: - Open the "Exceptions" ......